Reports of the death of suburbs have been greatly exaggerated; people continue to move to and settle in North America's suburbs. But once there, people often find similar levels of economic inequality and poverty that they saw in the cities. The suburbs, and our ways of living in them, are more complicated than their public image gives them credit for. In Still Detached and Subdivided? Suburban Ways of Living in 21st-Century North America, readers get to be flies on the walls during meetings of four planners, making us rethink what we thought we knew about suburbs based on case studies in New York, Portland, Houston, Vancouver, Toronto and elsewhere. In this innovative approach to urban studies, the planners are fictional, the concepts based on academic research and the arguments substantiated by large amounts of data presented as visually stunning maps and data visualizations.
Still Detached and Subdivided? offers an accessible yet rigorous account of "suburbanisms" as particular ways of living, demonstrating that aspects of this lifestyle occur simultaneously in urban and suburban places. The approach taken in this volume by Markus Moos and Robert Walter-Joseph of the Atlas of Suburbanisms research project suggests that policy solutions to suburban problems such as sprawl need to move beyond treating suburbs as homogeneous places in need of urbanization, and take into account their unique challenges and lifestyles.